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Friday, March 30, 2012

Some books are instant favorites. Dinosaur Roar! by Paul Stickland is one of those books for my boys.
While my oldest son has since moved on to enjoy more elaborate storylines, the
tattered pages of the book he’s now passed down to his little brother are
evidence that it was well-loved.

So when I stumbled on Dinosaur
More! by Henrietta Stickland, I was thrilled. It contains tons of great
dinosaur facts, like the meaning of their names, defenses, diet, and a small
scale drawing showing how big each dinosaur is compared to a grown-up.

This little drawing and a recent post on All
Things Beautiful provided the inspiration for this math and science
activity.

Not to be discouraged when the rain kept us indoors, I put away the sidewalk chalk and grabbed
a roll of toilet paper to use to “graph” dinosaur heights.Step 1: Read.

Step 2: Use a measuring tape to figure out the height of each
dinosaur using the “See How Big I Am” chart in Stickland’s book.

Step 3: Roll the toilet paper out to that length and tear off.

Step 4: Write the dinosaur’s name on a post-it note and attach to
the strip of toilet paper.

It was so much fun to compare how big the dinosaurs were! My
son was SUPER excited to discover that he is taller than Velociraptors!

When we ran out of toilet paper (I’m too cheap to waste more
than one roll), I gave my son some cards I’d printed with the names of all the
dinosaurs in the book.

He looked at the chart on each spread, wrote the height on
the back of the card, and then put them in order from smallest to biggest. Then he flipped over the cards. The
T-Rex was the biggest prehistoric lizard we learned about!Have a child that loves dinosaurs? Check out a few of these other dinosaur-related deceptively educational activities!Hunt for dinosaursMake and hatch a dinosaur eggDinosaur counting and measuring

His
mobiles can send you into a trance, just watching the way the tiny wire arms carry
bold organic shapes through the air. Even his static sculptures (often referred
to as stabiles) convey motion despite their stationery forms. I am a fan of his
work (can you tell?) and shamelessly want my boys to grow up to be as well.

To give my oldest son a fun, hands-on art appreciation
lesson, I grabbed some supplies:

12-gauge aluminum wire (I used a little more than a yard)

Craft foam sheets in assorted colors

Low-temp glue gun and glue sticks

Wire cutters and needle-nose pliers

Scissors

Ballpoint pen

Before we embarked on our craft, we read a wonderful book
which positively captivated my son. Sandy’s
Circus by Tanya Lee Stone tells the story of Calder’s journey from crafty
kid to engineering student, fireman on a ship, art school student, working
artist, and lastly, a sculptor. My son was brimming over with excitement when
the book was done.

“What are we making, Mom?” he asked overflowing with
curiosity.

Since Calder’s circus, made from found objects and set into
motion, was what eventually inspired his mobiles, I told my son we were going
to make our own mobile. I cut a large piece of wire, folded it in half, made a
loop and twisted it (sort of like a coat hanger without the hook and flat
bottom).

Then I gave my son the craft foam and had him pick a color
and shape. Blue circle, he decided. He used a small dessert plate as a template and cut out two circles.

On one end of the wire I’d cut, I bent it into a large loop.
He placed one of the circles underneath it and loaded the center with low-temp
glue from the glue gun. Then we added the second shape on top.

On the other end of the wire, I made a smaller loop and
attached another piece of looped wire, per his instruction. He cut out more
shapes. We built on the mobile until all the wire arms had shapes or more wire
brackets attached.

We held it up. Hmmmmm. One side was so heavy, the other side
tipped way up in the air.

To weigh it down some, my son added glue to the
perimeter of the shape, leaving one area unglued, and he stuffed paperclips
inside for added weight.

I love the final result and so does my son. It’s proudly
hanging from the ceiling-mounted light fixture in his room. I have no doubt he
fell asleep last night watching it dance by the glow of his night light.

Note: This wire is
REALLY malleable. If I did this activity again, I’d make our foam shapes
smaller or use a stiffer wire. The sheer size of the foam weighed our wire form
down quite a bit.

Monday, March 26, 2012

My mother-in-law bought my son a Scramble
Squares puzzle. It has challenged all of us to no avail. It’s certainly
been fun, though! Watching my son play with it gave me the idea to make a brain
bender math puzzle!

Since my son's teacher told us at his parent-teacher conference
that his addition skills were stronger than his subtraction, I thought this
would be a good chance to give him more practice.

I printed each on sticker paper and attached them to an
empty cereal box (like I did for both the magic squares and letter magnets I made in the past). I cut them out, attached magnet tape to the back, and handed
the easier of the two puzzles (blue) over to my son with a small magnetic board.

I
told him that all the pieces needed to form the shape of one large triangle. He needed to position each triangle magnet so every problem was adjacent to the corresponding answer.

He struggled at first. Before he got too frustrated, I put
the top most triangle on the board and told him to work off of that. In no
time, the whole triangle was put together!

NOTE: Depending on how saturated the ink is on the paper when you print the blue puzzle, you may need to draw a line under the numbers 6 and 9 on the answer triangles so they are not confused. While this was part of the original design, I found that the ink bled when I printed them and needed to redraw the lines.

Friday, March 23, 2012

After playing the nouns,
verbs, adjectives board game I made with my son several times, I realized he
needed other great ways to practice the parts of speech. Language arts just doesn’t “stick” with my
son like math.

He has suddenly developed an affinity for mysteries (we’ve
been reading the Hardy Boys Secret Files books to him at night and he’s been
reading James Skofield’s Detective Dinosaur books to us). The following two activities
capitalize on his newfound interest.

I designed a magnifying glass for my son to use when he played. (To make one, simply cut it out [including the center] and
laminate with heavyweight laminate.) Voila! Now he had a spy glass to remind him
of what adjectives tell you (e.g. weather, sound, shapes, etc.).

Adjective Detective
Hunt

Before my son came home from school, I picked out five
objects to describe and wrote adjectives (five each) that describe each on a
sticky note. When he walked in the door, I told him that he (aka Adjective
Detective) had a mystery to solve.

He needed to use the adjective clues on the first sticky
note (black, white, round, hard, fun) to find the object it described (his
soccer ball). On that object was tacked another sticky note with five more
adjectives (white, creamy, refreshing, smooth, cool). He used his super
sleuthing mind to deduce that what those adjectives were describing was none
other than milk! There he found another sticky note with five adjectives.

One by one, the adjective clues led him from object to object,
until he was rewarded by finding the final object (his colored pencils), which
also had a congratulatory note and a sweet treat as a reward.

Adjective Detective
Seek

Another day, I decided that it was time for my son to find some adjectives of his
own. I gave my little Adjective Detective a story that I wrote. Each sentence of the story has one
adjective (hopefully, I tried to be careful to not include any others).

The
story is about Detective Dog who works so hard to welcome new teddy bears to
the force by bringing in assorted foods each day. Unfortunately, the bears
never touch his homemade goodies.

After my son read the story all the way through (I helped him
with some of the tough words), I told him that in order to find out why the
teddy bears never eat, he’d have to find the adjective in each sentence. He
circled it and wrote the first letter of the adjective down below. All of these
adjectives (and their letters) were clues to solve the mystery.

So, why do the teddy bears never eat, you’re wondering,
right? Because they are always stuffed!!

My son demonstrated some real patience with this activity,
carefully looking for the adjectives and being excited as the answer to the
mystery began to reveal itself. It was a lot of reading but I was so encouraged
to hear him say “Yes, I knew it!” when he correctly identified the adjectives!

Monday, March 19, 2012

Last week was my son's spring break and since he spent a fair amount of the week with his grandparents, there were few deceptively educational activities happening at my house. So I'm finally getting around to publishing this old blog post about how I enticed my son into writing his kindergarten teacher a letter last summer.It's perfect for a hesitant writer or a child that needs a jump start writing.8 months ago ...

I knew getting a soon-to-be first-grader to write a letter without a major meltdown or cascades of “I can’t do it” was going to take nothing short of magic.

Instead of pulling a rabbit out of a hat, though, I typed up a series of sentence starters for a letter to his kindergarten teacher and threw them in one of my son's play hats. A few examples follow:

I had so much fun when we ___________.

I will miss ____________.

This summer, I am __________.I hope I don’t forget __________________.

I am glad you were my teacher because _____________.

You are a good teacher because _____________.

I am ____________ about 1st grade.

All my son had to do was pull one out, copy it down, and finish the sentence. Little by little, a letter was written. His teacher had worked so hard to teach him to read and write this past year, it’s only fitting that my son show off his new-found skills in a letter to her. (Plus, she gave the students her mailing address at the end of the year with a promise to write back.)

I cannot say enough about how blessed we were that Mrs. E was our son’s first school teacher. There are simply no words that even begin to explain how wonderful she is.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Last week my son wore out his Nerf over-the-door basketball
hoop. I kid you not. When we replaced it with a sturdier version of the same
thing, it dawned on me that I should work a little harder to get my money’s
worth out of that toy.

Why not combine spelling practice with shooting hoops?

I quick whipped together a score card and grabbed the list
of eight spelling words my son’s teacher sent home in his backpack.

I counted the letters in the word and told him how many
there were. He had to count the letters in the word he’d written. If his word
had the same number of letters, he added a “1” to that column of the scorecard.

Step 3: Did you use the right letters?

I scrambled the letters and
told them to him. If all the letters I read were in his word, he put a “1” in
the next column on the scorecard. NOTE: if extra letters were also in his word,
he still got a “1.”

Step 4: Is the word spelled right?

I told him the correct
spelling and he checked his work. If it was right, he added a third “1” to his
worksheet.

Step 5

He added the numbers together. This subtotal was recorded in
the “points possible” column.

Step 6

My son grabbed the basketball (unless there was a zero in
the “points possible” column). I gave him three tries to make a basket. If he
did, the earned the number of points listed in the “points possible” column.

This got my son’s brain working and blood pumping. He was
SUPER bummed to spell grape wrong (darn silent e) and disappointed when even
after three tries, he still didn’t make a basket, but he
tried really hard to both spell words right AND sink some shots.

Monday, March 12, 2012

How many parts make a whole? Cooking measurements were a great way to help my son answer that question. This was a simple
activity that he found surprisingly interesting. When it was done, he asked if
there was more he could measure!

Before we got started pouring and measuring, we read Stuart
J. Murphy’s Room for Ripley, a Level
3 MathStart Capacity book. In the book, Carlos is super excited to buy his
first fish. As he prepares the fish bowl with water, he learns all about just
how much water it’ll take to make a nice home for his new guppy. One cup is not
enough! 2 cups (or 1 pint) is not enough! As he continues to add more and more
water, he learns how many pints are in a quart, and how many quarts are in half gallon, etc.

When we finished reading about Carlos’ new pet, I had my son
using the measuring spoons, cups, and 2-cup measuring cup to complete a
worksheet of math (measuring) questions.

This was great fraction practice. I
was thrilled to hear his hypothesis that three 1/3-cups would equal 1 cup!

Friday, March 9, 2012

I’m hoping repetition will help my son memorize the
differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The board game I cooked up to
practice these parts of speech was SO much fun, my son didn’t have a clue he
was actually learning!! (insert evil laugh here)

Before we started playing, I gave him a cheat sheet that
defined what nouns, verbs, and adjectives are. Click the picture below to download it.

We reviewed these briefly and grabbed
two small buttons for game pieces. Then, I grabbed my DIY dry-erase die (instructions to make one are here) and
wrote each word (noun, verb, and adjective) on the dice twice with a fine-tip
dry-erase marker.

Now it was time to get our engines revved up and get
rolling! My son was ready to race around the nouns, verbs, and adjectives on
the homemade game board I made. (Download it here.)

How to Play

This game is super simple. Both players put their game
pieces on the starting flag. The youngest player goes first, rolling the
noun/verb/adjective die. Whatever is on top of the die when it stops rolling,
is the type of word that the player must move their game piece to on the board.
The next player rolls next, doing the same thing.

Play continues until the players reach the winner’s trophy.
The first player to roll the die and move to the final circle (i.e. roll “adjective”
and land on “big”) wins!

My son needed LOTS of reminders and referred to the cheat
sheet a lot, which tells me this fun way to practice is exactly what he needs.
When we were done, my son asked to play again … and again. Unfortunately,
dinner put a stop to our “play” time. There's always tomorrow, though!

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

My son is totally into LEGO Ninjago lately and since snakes
are an arch enemy of the four ninjas, I knew this activity would be a hit.
Although my son learned some about snakes when we made our reptile
bookmarks, this activity taught us even more about these slithery animals.

To start we read two great books. My son read Snakes and I read through many of the
questions in What’s Inside a Rattlesnake’s
Rattle. Both taught us loads about snakes! Did you know that some snakes
don’t hatch from eggs and that the more a snake eats, the more often it sheds
its skin? Cool!

When we were done reading, I got out some paint, empty
toilet paper tubes I’d been saving, a piece of red craft foam, and some brads.
It was time to make our own slithering snake!

First, my son cut V shapes on each end of the tubes, except
for on one tube, which we used as the tail. Then, my son painted the tubes.

He
cut out a forked tongue shape from craft foam and we stapled it one of the
tubes and glued on two googly eyes.

Then, my son used a paper punch to make two holes in the
tops of each tube (my son didn’t paint the bottom of the tubes). Now we layered
the holes one on top of the other, connecting the tubes together on top one at
a time with brads. Lastly, we connected the tail (the one tube that still had a
blunt end).

Isn’t my son’s snake “SSSSSSssssss”super?

When he was done, I gave him some snake-themed writing paper
and asked him to write three sentences about his snake. (Download the snake paper I made here.)

I got the idea for this wonderful craft from Odds ‘N’ Ends Art and adapted the
directions to use toilet paper tubes.

Monday, March 5, 2012

I found a wonderful little book at the library about magic
squares. Magic AND math? Really? What could be better?!?!

A magic square is a square grid of different numbers. When
you add the numbers across, down, and diagonal, they all add up to the same
number!

My son and I read the beginning of Colleen Adams' book,
which explained magic squares and shared the ancient tale of a tortoise in
China whose shell had dots that formed a magic square.

The book also shared the engraving by German
artist Albrecht Durer from 1514 that contained a magic square that added to 34.

To give my son a little math practice, I made some number
magnets 1-9, using the same process as the alphabet magnets I’ve made in the
past. Then, I gave him a small magnetic board and arranged several of the magnets,
leaving four or five off. It was up to him to figure out where to place the
remaining magnets to equal 15 in every row, column, and diagonal.

He needed to use both addition AND subtraction to complete the
magic square! What fun!

Download the number magnets I made, as well as four
configurations of magic squares that add to 15 here.

Friday, March 2, 2012

The other night we had the TV on during dinner and “Wheel of
Fortune” came on. Since I consider dinner our special time to share news about
each other’s day, this is VERY rare.My son has seen the show a few
other times (probably at Grandma’s house) and excitedly exclaimed, “Oh, I
loooooove this show! It’s my favorite grown-up show!” Huh?

While he most certainly can’t solve the puzzles, the sheer
idea of trying to guess the words, spinning a prize wheel, and winning money seem
pretty darn awesome to my 6-year-old. “Wheel of Fortune” was part of the
inspiration for this activity.

The rest of the inspiration came the following day, when we
were getting ready and on our way to my son’s school music program. As I helped him put his ears on (he played a mouse), he danced around saying, “I’m a mice. I’m
a mice!” Last I checked there was only one of him, so I explained that he was a
mouse, not a mice.

On our drive to the school, some geese flew overhead and as
he caught sight of them, he said, “You know what gooses do when they fly?” Oh
boy! “It’s GEESE, not gooses,” I corrected him.

What are tricky plurals?

Those words that either change drastically (i.e. the plural
version of the word is not the same as the singular version with an s on the end) or don’t change at all when they become plural (e.g. deer, glasses, etc.) are tricky for children to learn. This activity
is meant to help kids (namely, my son) use those words correctly.

How to Play

I made 16 cards with tricky plurals on them. The cards show
a single object with the plural version of the word under a folded section.
(Download an 8-page PDF here, print them on heavyweight cardstock, cut them
out, fold on the dotted line, and use an Exacto craft knife to carefully cut a V shape to tuck the
folded flap under.)

I fanned the cards out in my hand and my son drew one.

Then he thought hard about what the plural version would be.
If he knew it, he said it out loud (and sometimes spelled it, in the case of babies). Next, he opened the card’s flap
to reveal the plural.

If he had guessed right, he got to flick the spinner on the Pretend Prize Wheel I made. I explained that he
wasn’t winning real money. He was
still thrilled.

Download the prize wheel PDF here, print it on sticker paper, adhere to an empty cereal box for sturdiness, cut it out, punch holes in the wheel and spinner, and attach together in the center with a brad.

With each spin, he added the new prize money to his
winnings. Beware of the “You are bankrupt!” And good luck getting the spinner to
stop on “Double It!”

When the game was over, his pretend “winnings” totaled
$3.05. Before we finished up, he read a simple book filled with tricky
plurals: One Foot, Two Feet: an EXCEPTIONAL counting book.

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